Cures For The Outside Looking In
by Katherine Seibert, ETA ’20 Much like any afternoon, my office mates and I took a stroll around our school after lunch. And, much like any afternoon, I was mostly quiet. At lunch, I had missed yet another conversation between my co-teacher and the woman sitting opposite to her. From the words I recognized, I guessed they were swapping plans about their summers. When I lost the thread of what the conversation was about, I had resigned myself to listening for words or phrases in Korean I did know. Being continually on the outskirts of a conversation I barely understand can be isolating, and this isolation can feel all-consuming. I cannot expect my co-teacher to stop and translate every conversation of which I stand on the edge. But still, it’s better to be in the conversation as opposed to missing the chance to be present at all. This day was no different. Despite the summer heat descending upon Korea, everyone at school seemed determined to make loops around the worn track until we were all sweaty. We walked in relative silence, with my coworkers acknowledging my occasional attempts to describe the weather or the school garden with patient smiles. We took a final loop around the school and stopped to chat with a woman who worked in administration. The conversation was the most animated of the afternoon – my co-teacher, who had mentioned how tired she was earlier that morning, suddenly became chatty. Hands resting protectively on their stomachs, they laughed so loudly I’m sure they could be heard across the school. I, however, was more lost than ever. It wasn’t until the woman from administration leaned to place a hand on my co-teacher’s stomach that I remembered I had just learned that my Fulbright co-teacher was pregnant. And, I realized, with her baby bump showing in her sundress, so was the woman we spoke to. Putting this together, I tried to tune back into the conversation. I did my best to keep up – yet there’s been no chapter in a beginner’s Korean textbook on “making office small talk about being pregnant” so my vocabulary was limited to catching due dates and hearing basic words like “아프다” (hurt). What’s wonderful is that body language is universal, and womens’ stories of children and motherhood are not that different from country to country. Most of the Korean language evaded me in this conversation, but the context and the body language – women swapping the questions of – how’s your stomach? Are you eating okay? Does your back hurt? How far along are you? Six months? What date are you due? Oh, only one day before me! – and, the friendly teasing of – you’re not showing at all! Look at how skinny you are! – were all the same. Their hand gestures, waving in the air, mimicking a slim waist, were universal. Very soon there was a cluster of other teachers, some older and younger women, chuckling and talking about how much they showed during their own pregnancies, how much their backs hurt, whether their first pregnancy was worse than the second. Older women shook their heads, smiling, as the younger expectant mothers supported their own aching backs. We were surrounded by communal joy, spurred by shared experiences. How lovely community is in any language, and how grateful I was to stand on the outside looking in and see the joy. Afterwards, I asked my co-teacher to give me a rundown of the conversation. I was pleasantly surprised that most of my assumptions were correct, and she helped to fill in the gaps of what I missed – mainly morning sickness remedies from the older women passed on from generation to generation. After sharing my own version of the conversation, my co-teacher seemed surprised at first that I understood, and then shrugged. These conversations happen every day, all over the world, she said. Not just here. It was a brief and welcome chance for me to feel connected to the people around me. On that after-lunch walk, the gap between my life and theirs didn’t seem that large. [Featured Photo by Christa Hoskins]
From a Great Distance: Notes on Identity and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings
by Sarah Berg, Fulbright Alumna Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020) is a collection of personal essays that interrogate the contradictions inherent in the very idea of Asian American identity. Simultaneously acerbic and thoughtful, the essays in Minor Feelings revisit periods of Hong’s life upon which a multiplicity of theses about Asian American existence are scaffolded with a stability that might be surprising if Hong didn’t take such care in illustrating each supporting point with bold, honest prose. For this Asian American, these essays are a revelation. Hong and I have our differences (while we are both Korean American, I am 20 years younger and half white), but the way her topics resonated with me was uncanny—somehow, she directly referenced things that I knew. Reading the essays, I learned that, like me, Hong studied writing and art at a university in Ohio, navigated the deterioration of friendship through mental illness, and is drawn to the writers and artists Hito Steryl, Ocean Vuong, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Jos Charles, and most importantly to both of us, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Obviously, these interests are not exclusively mine, but to read a book that builds itself around a base of knowledge that I already had was wholly new. Minor Feelings’ speculative underpinning revealed itself to me thusly, humming with what-ifs—what if the literary canon was not solely composed by and about white men, what if our art bore the merit it deserves, what if people’s experiences are not in fact universal, but inextricable from the racial identities we inhabit? It made me feel like an intelligent and credible reader, banishing the wariness that can accompany reading an identity text when you are of the identity in question—that anxious second self peering over your shoulder, asking nervously, “How will this deny your own ideas of yourself? Will you be okay with it?” It is instinctual to fear these questions, but with “an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid” like Hong, Minor Feelings allows readers to resist the idea that a book must be an echo chamber of affirmation or its author an infallible source, a pressure that often falls upon writers of color (I would run out of fingers counting the times all heads turned expectantly toward me when a question nebulously about Korea would arise in my college classes). Some of my opinions differ from those expressed by Hong in the text. I, for example, bristled at her generalizing statements about Korean women being “so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down,” but found that her commitment to feelings—as minor or as major as we find them to be—was a fitting driving force for such a reckoning. Direct, uncertain, messy, and purposeful, Hong’s words grant complexity to readers like me who have been led to believe that they must define themselves by a certain singular “we.” But what about readers not like me? As I turned the pages of Minor Feelings, I found myself repeatedly wishing that it had been taught in all my college classes, been made required reading for white classmates who took Asian/Asian American studies courses only to gain so-called “Global Initiatives” credits or learn how to do business with China. I thought not only about these classmates, but about my white friends, too. As genuinely well-intentioned as they are, it has always been the white people I love whose genuine innocence (ignorance) has done the most harm. In the essay titled “White Innocence,” Hong writes, “Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.” Reading Minor Feelings, I found myself preemptively stifling my urge to recommend it to my white friends, knowing that somehow, I would end up having to explain such personal truths to them over and over again. Something my white friends love is “representation,” an all-too-well-known literary buzzword that once may have oh-so-innocently referred to the deliberate media portrayal of certain groups or experiences but has since become disappointingly derivative. It’s something that my younger self wrung out books, movies, and music in an attempt to find before realizing that it exists only at the intersection of the white gaze and capitalist marketability. Hong quotes poet Jos Charles in saying, “It is horrible to be tangible inside capital,” which succinctly describes the sickly disappointment I realized young me was experiencing. Even in the hands of the most well-intentioned creators, I found Asian American stories, in all their scarcity, to be devastatingly whitewashed. Why would I want to view myself as white people view me? It’s difficult to describe the dissonance that rings within my head when I see, for example, Vietnamese Lana Condor play half-white, half-Korean Lara Jean in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before [1]. It’s an adorable, well-acted movie adapted from a book by a Korean American writer, but when white friends gush about how it will make me feel seen, not even its plethora of strategically placed yogurt drinks can keep me from feeling that I’m really just being looked at, briefly and perhaps from a great distance. Are an “Asian” [2] face and scattering of palatable cultural symbols all that are needed to conjure my image? If we want to free representation from its neoliberal bounds, we must commit to complexity, which Minor Feelings does. Hong thwarts the smug self-awareness that grants representation its invisible, performative capital R, resisting the commodification of the “Asian American experience” as purposefully and fearlessly as she lays bare her observations of it. Dissonance is a steady presence in my life, but I encountered a new kind when I moved to Korea in 2019. Six months before the start of the pandemic, my face assumed a label
Monsoon Season
by Jame See Yang, ETA ’20 The remnants of last night’s horror still linger. Large pools of water fill the uneven, cracked cement. The weather is hazy—the old willow tree barely visible. My All-Stars are stained with the earth as I trudge through the trenches. A streak of light peeks through the clouds as they shift, the sky still painted grey. The ground squelches with each step as I raise my lens to scan the war-torn area. Shutter. The field of tall grass has been trampled; the survivors pinned by heavy droplets. An array of petals color the stone path as I set forth towards my destination. The daisies have been shaken up by the wind—their hair plucked away. The roses are nothing but their core. The less fortunate ones lie in the grass among their petals, while the others crouch over to protect their buds. The dull grey filter washes their life away. Shutter. I continue onward over the hill and take a left at the fork. The sun’s warmth touches my back, and I turn to be greeted by a sliver of light. As the clouds pass by, I catch a glimpse of the blue behind them. Despite last night’s heavy rainfall, the meadow glimmers under the sunlight. My tracks come to a halt; I close my eyes and take in my surroundings. The fresh air fills my lungs, and the hint of sweetness fills my mind with ease. Unlike most neatly planted fields of tulips, hues of red, yellow and magenta scatter across the field. Some have their bulbs stretched open, whereas some hold their petals near and dear. The tulips stand proud, resisting the dewdrops that cling to them. Nevertheless, they are still saturated and lively. Their vibrancy shines through the grey filter and through the monsoon terror. Shutter. [Featured Photo by Lulu Johnson]